Future of Work and Learning

I'd like to share with you some thoughts on life today, life tomorrow, and how work and learning fit into that, with a special focus on HR. How's HR doing? Could be doing better. Apparently only 25% of business leaders say that HR teams deliver excellent or good capabilities. How are employees doing? Again, could be better. I was shocked to learn that Gallup Research shows that 85% of employees worldwide are disengaged. As a matter of fact, the cost of that in the US alone is between $450 and $550 billion. That's a lot. It could result from the fact that we've organized our work, even in offices, with industrial-age factory-type models. That was a result of new technologies that enabled new ways of working. What are the new technologies today, and what new ways of working will it enable? Well, if you've seen the "Humans Need Not Apply" video, you'll know that Some people predict that 45% of jobs may just disappear. We could be looking at a jobless future. However, I have to think back to other examples of automation and what happened to people's jobs. Take the ATM, for example. The ATM was put into banks specifically to lower costs and get rid of tellers. Well then, why do we have more tellers today than ever before? Well, a very simple answer is that they do different things. The machines are doing what machines are good at, and the people are using higher-order skills and doing things that people are good at. I would predict that the remaining jobs or work, whether they're organized as jobs or not, will involve higher-order skills, more human capabilities, and cobotics—working effectively with technology, higher-order technology. I'd like you to have a look at a video, actually my favorite vision of the future. Unless you're in the tech industries, you may not have seen this before. Since I don't hold the copyright on this particular video, I'd like you to go now to YouTube and look up The Knowledge Navigator. And have a look at this 5-minute vision of the future. I apologize in advance for the fuzzy video quality. The video was actually made a while ago. The cobot butler understands things like "last semester," and he can search on "about 5 years ago," "Dr. Flemson" or something. As a matter of fact, Ray Kurzweil at Google is working right now on semantic intelligence and semantic search that may even be able to outstrip that. The cobot does simulations and what-if analysis based on real data and incomplete programming and parameter specification. We couldn't do that back then. However, the human still frames the what-if question. The Cobot does ask some questions, like journal articles only, but there's a difference in the kind of questions the butler asks versus the professor. I noticed that it's very, very personal. Pull up all the new articles I haven't read yet. I noticed the emotional intelligence and the independent decision-making. So the butler mentioned, "Your friend, Jill Gilbert." He also said, "I'm sorry, she's not available right now. I left a message that you had called." He had not been instructed to do that. They take actions on their own. He can handle instructions like, "If Kathy calls and make an appointment tomorrow morning with Tom Lee." No time is given. The butler has to think through it. Intelligently. And I noticed that he said something like, "Enjoy your lunch." As a matter of fact, Jill Watson, a tutoring application of Watson artificial intelligence, was rated higher in empathy than her human tutoring counterparts. I also noticed, "Excuse me," and the interruption for a colleague calling back but not when the mother called back. So again, there's some independent decision-making going on there. However, the cobot did say the lecture was 4:15, which may have caused some embarrassment to the professor. With more cobotics, people will need to learn how to work with cobots and what value they bring as humans and cultivate those skills. They'll need to understand in theory what cobots do in the same way an architect or an engineer understands the calculations now handled by computer. But performing like a computer no longer needs to be the bulk of the job or the education. Professions can be learned more quickly since healthcare workers, for example, with Watson or robotic surgeon, will need far less training than medical doctors of yesteryear. In fact, if we redesign healthcare work and take advantage of cobotic accuracy, Not only might healthcare be affordable, but perhaps medical mistakes will no longer be the third leading cause of death in the US after heart disease and cancer. How does this change our workforces and HR practice? Well, highly skilled workers will be younger and people will have multiple careers without the barrier to entry of 5, 10, or more years of schooling. Your workforce will be more diverse in a variety of ways, including younger and older, if you become flexible with work hours, conditions, and what we used to call career paths. The wisdom and interpersonal skills elders bring will become ever more valuable in the Robotic Age. And the aging population will need to earn a living. Don't forget, when the retirement age of 65 was introduced in England, Life expectancy was 66. It was a year to get your affairs in order. It was never intended to be a 20 or 30-year sojourn for bridge and golf. And since learning is most effective when it's apprenticed on the job, we'll need to design in the do and reflect cycle so often neglected today. We'll need to learn how to learn with cobots— together, continually. With neither the bot nor the human left out. Speaking of Ray Kurzweil, one of the things that's being worked on currently in a variety, by a variety of people like Ray and Martine Rothblatt and others, is digital twins. Instead of having this vision of the artificial intelligence butler, you can make a twin of yourself to make the decisions that you would have made under a variety of circumstances. And then while you're working in one office, your digital twin could be working in another. Actually, you could replicate yourself indefinitely. Not only will you get more done, but you can learn more. You and all your twins could sync when one of you learns something, and your digital twin can teach others. So will your employees need reskilling and upskilling for this kind of a future, the artificial intelligence future and even the digital twin future? I would think so, yes. They will need to focus on higher-order skills, more creativity, problem recognition, solving, designing solutions, and a whole lot more. But how will they reskill? And upskill? Well, that's something that my colleagues and I have been thinking about at my new think tank called 2050ed.tech. We're a group of technologists, business strategists, designers, and humanists envisioning the future of business education. Why is it 2050? Well, actually Ray Kurzweil predicts a future in only the 2030s '30s with cortical implants that will connect your brain to the World Wide Web in a seamless fashion. And frankly, if you need more memory, you just buy some memory and put it in. What will that mean for education? We haven't quite worked that out yet. However, at the think tank and the Tinker Lab where we implement what we come up with. We do have a vision for the '20s and '30s. First of all, based on my own creativity research on lateral innovation called Fusion, I believe there's a difference between hunting and gathering. When we have a problem, we hunt for information because we need to solve that problem. However, we also We also gather, we also collect things into the unique workshop of our minds. And when you recognize problems and create something initially to try and solve them, you work with what's at hand. So learning needs to take account of gathering as well as hunting. Now for collecting type programs to develop your unique workshop, I think it'll start with psychoneuroprofiling and coaching. A variety of ways of figuring out how is your workshop designed so far and what do you want to do with it. For hunting-type learning, I think that'll be integrated with work and problem-solving, creativity, innovation. You won't go away for a year or two or four. You'll need to learn right now in your workspace to solve a problem. It'll be behavioral and experiential. Um, it'll be mobile and there will be micro-learning to help you bit by bit to change what you do as well as to interject new ideas for solving problems today. I believe there will be a blurring of education, consulting, and incubation and their profit models. There will be an expertise or mentoring exchange, a community, learning community, not just the sage on the stage, the old professorial model. There may be results-based profit sharing or subscription model for curated info and experiences, and of course, mixed reality. We're working with Watson, and I believe that both kinds of programs will be AI-coached, personalized, and adaptive. The program will be different for each person based on what you know and how quickly you're picking it up. I think biometrics of yourself and others should be integrated with all of this so that you have an understanding of your own internal state, how to influence your internal state, how to synchronize authentically and influence others. There will be micro-credentialing for little bits that you now know and can do, which can be added up into personalized degrees or unique handprint, which is a simple way to envision who you are as a unique resource doing a unique job or portfolio of work projects in networks, which today we know as markets, and organizations. I think organizations will be restructuring themselves and their processes, not every year, not even every quarter or every day, just continually. No more unfreeze, change, refreeze. And in terms of learning and education, no more train, do, retire. There will be continuous change requiring continuous learning. Will HR manage only humans? Well, I would highly encourage you to go have a look at Nadia Youssef's TED Talk, "Why You Should Treat the Tech You Use at Work Like a Colleague." She has a very good point. If you paid $1 million for a high-level executive or any sort of expert and plunk them down in the workplace, and didn't manage their interactions with their teammates, well, that would be insane. You wouldn't do that. You would give it a— you would give this resource a job description, train them, have performance goals and periodic reviews. You'd probably have a team build. You'd have them pictured on the organization chart. You might do 360-degree evaluations and help that resource perform better. Well, wait a minute, if it's the technology and the humans working so closely in concert, is that IT's job or is that HR's job? Is it both? I would say it's a fusion of both. And tomorrow you might find that you're not just managing H. Maybe there needs to be a new name for HR. So do you need reskilling and upskilling? I'll leave that question with you. I will follow it on with another question: how will you be an effective partner in organizational transformation? Because your organizations and the work that people are doing in it is digitally transforming. Unless you already have enough, then you need to be doing some learning about advanced technologies and experimenting with it. Play with it. You'll need to make sure you're up to speed on human change, how to help humans change, and how to help people integrate with technology in effective ways. We need facilitators to co-design with people how they work best. If that's not what you're doing today, you should think about doing that tomorrow. It'll create enormous value, but you'll need to know design and co-creation. One very effective approach is design thinking, so it's probably time to learn more about that and give that a try if you haven't already. What's design thinking? Well, it's a human-centered approach to innovation. That draws from the designer's toolkit— art, architecture, industrial design, and so forth— to innovate at the center of what people need and want, what's technically feasible, and what's a viable, good business strategy, a way of offering it. And you want to start with what people need and want. Design thinking as a field has moved from product design to service design and customer experience design, and now it's actually moved further into employee experience design. As a matter of fact, research shows that the more importance an organization places on design thinking, the faster the organization grows. Respondents at companies where HR delivers the highest level of value, they're almost 5 times more likely to be using design thinking than their peers. Can HR training be transformational? Yes, it can, if you're transforming people, how they do their jobs from an integrated perspective, including the technology, and how the organization operates, both the formal and the informal or cultural organization. Conversation. Is that outside the sphere of what HR does today? In many cases, yes, it is. So on the one hand, you may be afraid that with fewer employees, HR, the need for HR is gonna shrink, but then again, maybe HR will be transforming and grow. So as a final note, You may be asking, "When was that video made?" I first saw the Knowledge Navigator in 1987 when I joined Accenture to build mainframe computers, which were not very much like the Knowledge Navigator Butler. This was a vision by John Sculley at Apple of what technology and work and life could become. Interestingly enough, Every piece of technology, all those capabilities existed back then except for one: the ability to unfold a computer and have no crease in the middle. That's it. So that brings to my mind a big question. If we had all the tech then, why hasn't that vision happened? Why isn't that your daily life? I'm afraid I can't quite answer that question beyond saying that the technology was much more expensive back then. Hardware speed and connectivity, all of that was not as well developed as it is today. And technology adoption itself has been accelerating exponentially since that time. I believe we will be experiencing that sort of technology-enabled work and life and learning faster than you may think. So empower yourself today and empower those around you with the skills, the tools, the learning that you'll need to create a better future. And I wish you all the best for an amazing future. Future.